When markets drop, it's not only our 401Ks that disappear—it's our future stories. No amount of financial doomscrolling can appease our anxiety or offset the grief for lost hopes and dreams.
Key Points
- Doomscrolling during financial crises is deeply personal—it’s your future on the line.
- Compulsive balance-checking is driven by anxiety, loss aversion, and the illusion of control.
- Market volatility increases helplessness, disrupts personal identity and destroys future narratives.
- Financial grief is real but often goes unacknowledged, making it harder to process.
- Stress and uncertainty impair decision-making and increase impulsive behaviors.
- Economic setbacks can erode hope and institutional trust, increasing partisanship and social conflict.
5 Ways to Cope More Constructively
- Limit portfolio and financial headline check-ins: Set fixed times to review finances. Avoid impulsive peeking.
- Reframe the narrative: You are not your account balance.
- Exhale. Take small, intentional steps—budgeting, adjusting goals, seeking advice—that can restore a sense of control.
- Don't worry alone. Talk to someone. Normalize the conversation around money and mental health.
The tariff policy announcements have destroyed a lot of wealth. What we aren't talking about is what that lost wealth represents. The dollar value pales compared to the emotional distress caused by the symbolic meanings we attach to our savings.
Uncertainty where our future livelihood is on the line, triggers a stress response. Our brains are designed to avoid possible danger at all costs, which leads to behaviors that attempt to reduce it. This includes rumination like doomscrolling, anxiety, and short-circuited decision-making skills. While stress responses are adaptive in the short term, prolonged uncertainty can cause serious health problems and maladaptive social behaviors. In other words, people get angry, mean, reactive, suspicious, jumpy, tribal, and out of control.
And that doesn't get at the underlying psychological damage these trade wars have caused. The financial losses have been huge, but not as big as the psychological impact of lost future plans. A savings account is just a way of saving current effort and energy for a future goal. Kind of like a battery.
Our future goal lives in our brains, making pictures of what we want to happen or how we want to live. Even if it's defensive. ("I don't want to run out of money"), it's still a picture.
Financial loss is always experienced in the context of what that money means to you. For example, fill in the blank:
I lost money so I can't ____________
Whatever you wrote in that blank is what you grieve when you lose money. It’s what that money represents that matters. That could be something tangible like a vacation home, subjective like freedom from worry in your old age, or something at the core of your identity, such as your role as the family provider. Recognizing how emotions and identity get tied up in our savings can help us separate the practical pain from the psychic and help us navigate through financial downturns and uncertainty like we see today without panicking.
The Uselessness of Financial Doomscrolling
Nothing triggers financial doomscrolling—obsessively checking headlines and stock prices--faster than chaos and uncertainty—especially when it hits close to home. I wasn't the only one experiencing portfolio panic and that sinking feeling in my stomach after the recent tariff announcements wiped out $10 trillion of wealth in three days. As a psychologist, I should know that letting my emotions drive my behavior, much less my investment decisions is a bad idea. But I still got sucked into the financial doomscrolling loop, searching for reassurance that my family's future hadn't just gone up in smoke. I am not alone. CNBC and MarketWatch reported a massive uptick in people logging into investment platforms like Robinhood, Fidelity, or E*TRADE multiple times per day to check losses or, worse, to make impulsive trades.
The Psychological Cost of Market Volatility
Don't be fooled by the political rhetoric about how short-term pain will make things right again. The cost of eggs is the least of our worries. The most damaging costs of the tariff wars are psychological—and they stick around a long time. Lost savings, even on paper, mean watching our imagined futures disappear. Saying goodbye to "what would have been" sends a signal to our brain: "Danger! Danger!"
Our brains are wired to pay attention to any potential threat so we can do what's needed to survive. Where arly humans constantly scanned the horizon, we scan the the media. Our brains collect all this information from headlines and social media and craft it into a narrative so we can make sense of what happened and how they affect us.
Our savings are more than dollars. They are symbols of our past effort, but, more importantly, they are the foundation for the story of our future—our vision of what it will be. The existential anxiety over current losses is amplified by the declining likelihood that our future story makes sense. These stories are part of our identity; they encapsulate our goals and drive our motivation. The losses may only be on paper today, but that doesn't mean we are any less invested in them or that the grief we feel at our declining balances is any less real or painful.
Why We Can't Stop Scrolling
Market volatility breeds uncertainty, which our brains experience as deeply uncomfortable. Uncertainty undermines our sense of control and predictability—two essential components of psychological safety. In response, we seek more information—news, account balances, forecasts—hoping to feel reassured. But instead of calming us, this search often traps us in doomscrolling spiral, especially when the information is negative.
Fear-driven scrolling increases our sensitivity to emotionally threatening news. Rather than restoring control, this content validates our worst fears, amplifies anxiety, and fuels a compulsive loop: the more we search, the more anxious we become and the more compelled we feel to keep searching. Our anxiety increases with the amount of news we consume during or after a crisis—and this one isn't even over yet.
These effects go far beyond financial concerns. They impair judgment, influence relationships, and erode well-being. Negative emotional content spreads quickly and widely, reinforcing collective anxiety. Media outlets, incentivized by clicks and engagement, use algorithms that prioritize emotionally arousing stories—often dubbed "fear-porn"—which feed the cycle and deepen distress, increase impulsivity, and reduce long-term decision-making capacity. This means we not only feel worse, but we are more likely to make mistakes and risk reinforcing harmful financial behaviors like panic selling.
Compulsive behaviors, like doomscrolling, are attempts to reduce distress, reclaim agency, and manage the fear of loss. Like doomscrolling, repetitive portfolio-checking offers a fleeting illusion of control but provides no actionable insight, reinforcing our sense of helplessness. Any momentary relief is lost because the behavior reinforces the very emotions they aim to resolve. The real compulsion isn't just about information—it's about preserving a fragile future story that feels at risk of unraveling.
When Doomscrolling Gets Personal
Doomscrolling isn’t curiosity. It's anxiety in action. Only today, instead of stories of viruses and war, it's more intense because it’s personal.
At some point in all our portfolio-checking over the past days, the data revealed something harder to stomach. It's not just fluctuation; it's decline. We're watching our own futures unravel. You realize you may not buy that new house. You may not retire at 60 (or at all). You may not be able to pay your family's medical bills. The numbers represent lost possibilities, turning doomscrolling into mourning surveillance—we're watching the erosion of hope. When the numbers drop, so does our confidence—not just in the market, but in the narrative of our life that we thought was unfolding.
The Gut Punch of Grieving What Could Have Been
The real gut punch is the grief that comes with the destruction of our future story. This kind of nontangible loss still causes genuine emotional pain. We are grieving something that hasn't really ended but feels suddenly gone. Because we understand ourselves through the stories we tell, when those narratives fall apart, such as from an unexpected financial downturn, we can experience identity dissonance, undermining our sense of who we are.
Society doesn't acknowledge the need to mourn the loss of expected future rewards, such as those that result in a delayed retirement, a lost dream home, or not sending the kids to college (Doka, 1989). But since savings are a physical manifestation of our dreams and goals, they are vital our motivation and resilience.
The reality is that rebuilding savings after a loss is difficult because you have less to work with—you'd need a 100% gain to recover a 50% loss—or 25 years at current bond yields, not accounting for further market volatility. But when the market wipes out years of effort, it strips us of agency and undermines our beliefs in the strategies we used to reach our goals (Wrosch et al., 2003). Feeling helpless and worthless aren't minor setbacks. These create deep psychological distress.
Market Chaos Has a Broad Social Impact
Financial setbacks extend far beyond the wallet, undermining not only future plans but also creating a negative bias in how we think and plan, and skewing our fundamental beliefs about fairness, predictability, and controllability. When we feel that their efforts no longer produce positive outcomes, we stop trying. This can reduce financial agency and diminish our feelings of competence and hope especially when those goals are integral to our identity, such as our ability to provide for our family or care for our children.
The cost of market chaos ripples out across society. People who have experienced significant financial losses are more likely to hold long-lasting mistrust in banks, markets, governments, and even other people. The result is a crowd of angry, disillusioned, increasingly tribal citizens who rely on in-group affiliations, further increasing partisanship, hate, and social conflict (Sapienza & Zingales, 2012; Navarro-Carrillo et al., 2018). Social conflicts only benefit politicians who usurp power by promising an end to the chaos and suffering they created.
Rewriting the Story
Losing money is painful, but losing our faith in the future is devastating. And these emotional shifts often happen silently, buried under shame or self-blame of "If only…" and "I should have…" In the long term, they alter our ability to trust and our motivation to try.
Doomscrolling and portfolio checking may have begun as a quest for information, but they have become a ritual of loss. We started by trying to understand the market and make ourselves feel better, but we ended up watching our future dissolve, one tap at a time. Loss can run the gamut of emotions, from sadness and anger to depression. These are very human responses, but they are awful for decision-making. Financial doomscrolling is not a failure of discipline as much as it is a human response to disrupted identity and hope. Normal though it may be, breaking the cycle is essential if doomscrolling keeps your negative emotions high and undermines your critical thinking and well-being.
Don't let the trade wars and inflation fears turn your future story into Bleak House. The task now is to stay calm and rewrite our stories grounded in resilience and patience rather than fear. We did it before; we can do it again.
References
Doka, K. J. (Ed.). (1989). Disenfranchised grief: Recognizing hidden sorrow. Lexington Books.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291. https://doi.org/10.2307/1914185
Navarro-Carrillo, G., Valor-Segura, I., Lozano, L. M., & Moya, M. (2018). Do economic crises always undermine trust in others? The case of generalized, interpersonal, and in-group trust. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1955. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01955
Sapienza, P., & Zingales, L. (2012). A trust crisis. International Review of Finance, 12(2), 123-131. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2443.2012.01152.x
Snyder, C. R. (2002). Hope theory: Rainbows in the mind. Psychological Inquiry, 13(4), 249–275. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1304_01
Wrosch, C., Scheier, M. F., Miller, G. E., Schulz, R., & Carver, C. S. (2003). Adaptive self-regulation of unattainable goals: Goal disengagement, goal reengagement, and subjective well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(3), 503–517. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.3.503
Dr. Pamela Rutledge is available to reporters for comments on the psychological and social impact of media and technology on individuals, society, organizations and brands.